Abstract
Scientific discovery depends not only on what ideas are funded, but on how researchers themselves translate ideas into resource requests that shape teams, training, and future knowledge production. Using a unique dataset covering the full universe of funded and unfunded grant applications to two major philanthropic science funders in Europe between 2011 and 2022 - linked to peer-review scores, investigators’ prior research records, and itemized budgets - we examine where gender differences arise in the funding process. We find that female principal investigators receive 6.4–7.7% less funding per application than male investigators, a gap that is partly driven by differences at the proposal stage: women request 5.4% less funding, conditional on proposal quality and researcher characteristics, despite being more likely to receive funding. This gap is concentrated in team formation, with women systematically proposing smaller PhD cohorts and no comparable differences across other budget categories and is largest among early-career researchers. Extrapolating these estimates to the U.S. context suggests that women may be systematically requesting on the order of $1 billion less annually from major public funders such as the NIH and NSF, with implications for training capacity, knowledge production, and the cumulative organization of scientific labor.